Thanks for the link - that is an interesting concept with the Rugged design.

The concept with Allegro is not to make all of the AVR pins automotive capable, rather make the board automotive capable for use in the car.

The power supply will support direct connection to the 12V connection in the car, whilst being able to withstand peaks of up to ~40V which occur when the battery is charging or as a result of starting the engine. On top, with CAN and LIN the board will be capable of commuicating with in-car networks.

I am hoping that the CAN and LIN busses will also be of interest for those who want to network Arduinos to exchange data between them outside of the automotive environment, and who require something simpler than ethernet.

Since I don't have an automotive qualified 8-bit AVR with USB, I intend to implement the USB/UART interface so that it can be broken off, thus leaving the remaining board as 100% auto qualified. The USB/UART interface isn't always needed in all applications.

Does that sound OK to you? Alternative would be an AVR32, but I want to avoid to much unnecessary components on the board when doing the EMC testing. Seems pointless to me adding huge complexity and time into fixing potential EMC issues in the USB/USART section of the design just to pass standard EMC tests.